Froomkin: Reporters Treating-Voter ID-As Just Another Squabble-Committing Journalistic Malpracitice

[kpete]

For reporters to treat this issue like just another political squabble is journalistic malpractice.
Reporters Treating Voter ID As Just Another Squabble Committing Journalistic malpracitice
Dan Froomkin
Reporters Know What the 'Voter ID' Push Is Really About. Why Don't They Just Say So?

And the pursuit of this goal ostensibly in the name of voter fraud is an outrageous deception that only works if the press is too timid to call it what it really is.

........................

For reporters to treat this issue like just another political squabble is journalistic malpractice. Indeed, relating the debate in value-neutral he-said-she-said language is actively helping spread the lie. After all, calling for someone to show ID before voting doesn’t sound pernicious to most people, even though it is. And raising the bogus issue of voter fraud at all stokes fear. “Even if you say there is no fraud, all people hear is ‘fraud fraud fraud’,” said Lawrence Norden, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Think about it. If you were covering elections in another country, and one political party was actively trying to limit voting in the name of a problem that objectively didn’t exist, would you hesitate for a moment to call out that tactic — and question that party’s legitimacy? Hardly.

.......................

The GOP has taken increasingly radical positions, confident that the media’s aversion to taking sides will protect it from too much negative coverage. But failing to call out the voter ID push is like covering the civil rights movements and treating “separate but equal” as if it was said with sincerity.





.......

more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-froomkin/reporters-know-what-the-v_b_1719778.html

[byeya]

1. Just a thought: Maybe some journalists do and it's the highly paid and "boss sensitive" editors

who sit on the story; threaten the journalist; reassign the journalist or a combination thereof.

The above aside, it seems the term journalistic ethics has become an oxymoron.

[2pooped2pop]

2. what you call "journalistic malpractice"

I call treason.

Without the media and their outright lies, misinformation, selective reporting and failure to investigate, the right wing take over and rape of this country could not have happened.

Treason. I call it treason.

[spanone]

3. journalistic malpractice is the norm for 'reporters' today

journalists are few and far between these days

[Downwinder]

4. You can sure hear them shout when their credentials

are not recognized.

[qb]

5. What journalists? All I see are tabloid personalities on every channel.